


a metal-eating flower

by fluorescentgrey



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1950s, Beat Generation, California, LSD, M/M, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-05
Updated: 2020-06-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:47:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24547885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: Marin County, 1955. In which rival poets address the untenable stalemate.
Relationships: Joseph Liebgott/David Kenyon Webster
Comments: 6
Kudos: 25





	a metal-eating flower

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ipsilateral](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ipsilateral/gifts).



When Liebgott came back from Mendocino, he didn’t do a lot of talking. Everybody knew that he vehemently opposed logging as an institution, but everybody also knew that he was broke, having spent all his money buying LSD from psych students at Berkeley and bailing himself from the central lockup. If he were a different kind of man, and it were a different kind of century, he would be on Alcatraz, or else in the experimental wards on Treasure Island. But it was 1955, so he was a writer. David had come to California to get out of trouble in Cambridge, where the pigs were onto him for being a communist. There were no fewer pigs in San Francisco, but it was, in those days, still somewhat conceivable that one could disappear from all one’s debtors and obligations by simply dissolving into the woods. Later, Richard Brautigan would have things to say about the gathering of a Californian. Then, it just seemed like what you did, having come into being and consciousness at such a strange time, old enough to remember the war, to remember watching newsreels at the cinema beside your mother and siblings, too young to have done anything about it. 

Now that everybody was back in the city, having been far-flung for summer employment cutting trees and maintaining trails and fishing up and down the coast and even in Alaska, there was a party out at Winters’ place, at an undisclosed location on the way to Bolinas; “A cookout,” David had heard, from Nixon, Winters’ ‘friend,’ on the telephone a few days prior. “To celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?” David was not in the mood for celebrating anything, having recently had a piece rejected from the Kenyon Review. 

“It is of Dick’s esteemed opinion that one doth not require a reason to celebrate,” Nixon said. He’d been in Korea and sometimes he seemed a little off. “Just come, will you? Bring beers.” 

His doorbell rang on the day of the party, about five minutes before he had planned on leaving. It was Liebgott. “Nix said people are carpooling with you,” he said regretfully. He had combed his hair and he wore a nice white shirt, but his hands were rough with sun and he was missing a fingernail. 

“Um, I guess so,” David said. They waited around another fifteen minutes, more than they could really spare, but nobody else showed up. He began to wonder if this was one of Nixon’s pranks. “Did anybody else say — ”

“No. Fuck it, let’s just go.” 

“Fine, fine, jeez.” 

They got in the car, and Liebgott turned up the jazz channel on the radio, rolled down the window, stuck his elbow out it and rested his head in his hand, like a figure model in a life drawing class settling carefully into the pose that had been requested. “You look good,” Webster said. 

“What?” 

“I said you look — well.” 

“It was a summer of hard work, Web,” Liebgott said evenly. “Not that you know what that’s like.” 

David worked a day job as an accountant for a manufacturer who made rubber gloves. He seethed. “Must you always bust my balls?” 

Liebgott shrugged. “Someone needs to remind the would-be Marxist of his class solidarity.” 

“I’m no more bourgeois than you.” 

“You keep telling yourself that,” said Liebgott. “Besides, it isn’t a competition.” 

“ _You_ were just trying to make it one!” 

“Was I?” He reached for the volume knob on the radio and endeavored to turn up the jazz station, but it was already as loud as it would go. Maybe something was wrong with the recording. 

“Let’s just drive in… a spirit of contemplative silence,” Webster suggested. 

“Web, I just got back from cutting trees all summer; you can’t fucking humor me?” 

“What, by allowing you to make fun of me for an hour?” 

“Yes!” 

It was times like these that David resented him for writing the way he did. When David had first come to town, two years ago now, he had at first been skeptical that Liebgott had actually written the things that were published under his name. His poems were expansive and gestural. They had the meditative stillness of the Pacific in the fog or the redwoods. He was always coming up with turns of phrase that would haunt you for days after you read them. That they came out of this small and angry person was nigh inconceivable. In turn, he knew that Liebgott thought he was a hack and a coward for writing revolutionary verse but being an accountant in real life. The result was this untenable stalemate. 

“Well,” David said, “I won’t have it.” 

They drove across the Golden Gate Bridge. The early afternoon light through the patchy clouds had burned the fog off and cast flame-bright color on the water and across the headlands. In the corner of his eye he could see Liebgott studying it, memorizing it, so that he could write it later. 

“Did you write anything when you were up there,” David asked him, breaking his own fucking promise immediately. 

“Yeah, couple things. One of them — little one — got accepted by the Kenyon Review.” David regretted asking. He was pretty sure his face was burning. It was probably this that emboldened Liebgott to keep fucking talking. “You probably won’t like that one. It’s too — what’d you say. _Pretentiously hyperfixated_.” 

“That was — ” It had a been a contentious meeting of the collective. “I don’t think that about all of your work.” 

“You were right about that one poem, though,” Liebgott said, a rare concession. “It was a weird batch of acid.” 

“Did you bring any tonight?” 

“Yeah. Don’t tell Dick.” 

“Of course not.” 

“You want some?” 

David had never tried it before, but he had read the articles in _Time_ magazine heralding it as a breakthrough of psychiatry. “Sure.” 

“Well," said Liebgott, rummaging for the tabs in his shirt pocket, "you better take it now to give it time to kick in.” 

They were about forty minutes out from Winters’ place. Logically, David understood that this was probably a bad idea. The sense of competitiveness between them, he understood, was deeply illogical, and moreover antithetical to most of the radical praxis he did believe to be legitimate at his very core, and yet — and yet. He took the little square of paper off Liebgott’s finger and pressed it against his tongue. In the corner of his eye he watched Liebgott do the same. 

“Why do you take this stuff,” David asked him. 

Liebgott was watching the ineluctable movement of the misshapen hills. “Why do you write poetry,” he said. “Why are you an accountant.” 

“Because I have to,” David said. “Because I have to do _something_.” 

“Hmm,” Liebgott said. 

David waited for another beat. Then he said, “That’s it?” 

“That's all I’m about to fucking tell you.” 

“Why?” 

“God,” Liebgott groaned, melting into his seat, “you’re like a fucking three year old sometimes.” 

They drove onward. David had driven up the coast several times before, but today it seemed remarkably, effervescently beautiful, like a painting, or more like an infinite number of paintings layered over each other, like a piece of film exposed every time a human being had ever blinked since the dawn of consciousness, everything in nature — every leaf — having been created with such perfection, a level of perfection that could not be seen with the naked eye… Below them the sea was a great hypnotic lung. “I think it’s affecting me,” he said to Liebgott. 

“Do you want to pull over?” 

“No. The car is… an extension of my body.” 

“Alright.” 

They made it about four more minutes like this, before they rounded a corner and David noticed that he could not differentiate where the sea ended and the sky began, and, in considering the repercussions of this fact, nearly drove them over a cliff. He pulled over, turned off the engine, pocketed the keys, got out of the car, and was running up the hill before Liebgott untangled himself from his seatbelt, running into the sky, because he knew when he touched it — 

Somebody grabbed his shoulder, and they fell to the ground together in a heap. “What the fuck are you doing, Web?” 

He could feel his heart racing. They lay there together staring up into the manifestation of the meaning of blue. 

Perhaps hours passed before he remembered how to speak. “How do you stand feeling like this all the time?” 

He felt Liebgott shrug. “You get used to it. It’s better than the alternative.” 

“What’s the alternative?” 

“Not being able to see how beautiful everything is,” Liebgott told him. “Sometimes.” 

“Why?” 

“Oh my god,” Liebgott said. “I had a very difficult childhood.” 

“Nixon said you came from Europe,” David confessed. 

“How long have you been sitting on that one.” 

He had done a lot of lying awake and thinking. Perhaps that should have told him something. 

They reached for each other with impeccable coordination. The kiss, which was like some third entity outside of either of their discrete selves, tasted like warm grass and dirt and salt, and it escalated with speedy if half-blind efficiency so that they were eventually obliged to take strategic measures to keep from rolling down the hill into the bank of low trees. The wind moved over them like a cool bedsheet on a hot night, and for once in his life David did not find himself meditating upon what he was going to write about this when it was over. It was all unfolding before him in poetic formation without his having to think about it. 

\--

By the time they made it to the party, it was dark, and the beers in the backseat had gone quite warm. They ignored the bonfire out back in favor of gulping water from the tap in Winters’ kitchen like animals. By the time Nixon came in, seeing the commotion in the house, they had moved on to eating cheese they had found in the icebox. “Glad to see you boys found your way okay,” Nixon said, clapping David’s back so manfully he almost spat brie across the room. “You have sticks in your hair, by the way, Lieb.” 

“Duly noted, Nix.”

Over Nixon’s shoulder Liebgott met David’s eye, pressed his tongue against his canine tooth and winked. Something like every remaining mystery on earth shone out of him for a split second, a single cosmic ray of suffocating energy, and then it moved on again before he could write any of it down.

\---

\--

-

**Author's Note:**

> the title of this story is of course from [brautigan](http://brautigan.cybernetic-meadows.net/tiki-index.php?page=The+Gathering+of+a+Californian), one of the all time greats. 
> 
> this was written for [rainandassam](https://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/blog/rainandassam) and an anonymous donor in exchange for their donations to racial justice organizations on the ground in minneapolis. i'm doing an [ongoing fundraising drive](https://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/post/620033047264378880/ok-everybody-i-hope-youve-seen-my-post-from-last) for organizations on the front line of the racial justice movement right now - if you'd like to take part, and i hope you will, please give and message me with proof (on tumblr or at fgreyfx @ gmail) and i will write you something.


End file.
